Operation blow-dry

Refugees in the Kawergosk camp, where three weddings a week take place. Photo: Andrew Quilty

On a grassy hill above a syrian refugee camp in northern Iraq, four girls sit gossiping and eating chocolate Magnum ice-creams. It's late afternoon and they use immaculately manicured hands to shield their eyes from the glare of the oil refinery on the horizon. A waft of sewage drifts past on the warm air but they don't seem to notice.

Down by the dusty main gates of Kawergosk Camp, a girl in her late teens slips behind a water tanker, hidden but for a glimpse under the truck's chassis of her black leggings and glittering red stilettos. She heads off up the road to the hill, past wedding-dress shops that tout their wares from behind plastic windows.

The dresses look incongruous against the backdrop of endless white refugee tents. But with at least three weddings a week taking place here, and most of the women unable to leave the camp to visit town without the requisite male escort, the dress shops are more important than the kebab stands and ice-cream vendors around the corner.

Inside one of the bridal shops, an older man sits idly behind a sewing machine, watching some boys play pool at a table he's set up at the back of his tent. Next door, he has fashioned a narrow covered walkway to a second tent used as a makeshift beauty salon. It is lined with a rainbow of dresses. A bride's family will pay about $US100 ($108) for his garish, tight-bodied meringues heavily embellished with diamanté. This is about twice the weekly wage in Syria, but exponentially more for those living without work in the camp.

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The man's wife, who appears to be in her late 30s, is sitting on a chair in the beauty salon having her darkly luxuriant hair blow-dried. The salon session is as much about keeping her husband happy as it is about providing her with an escape from camp life: he likes her hair to be beautiful. Twice a week she takes her place before the mirror as her heavily pregnant friend and employee, Mouna Sabre Aubi, runs a brush rhythmically through her hair, nattering over the noise of the dryer.

Syria, particularly enclaves around Damascus and Aleppo, where many of these refugees once lived, was known for its modern interpretation of Islam. Many women don't wear headscarves and some even have tattoos, while the younger generation enjoys wearing figure-hugging clothes that wouldn't look out of place in LA. And yet they're far from Westernised.

Shinda Murad is 23 and, until two months ago, was four years into a university degree in Damascus. Now she spends her days helping in the camp administration offices. She hates it, particularly since she doesn't get paid. She likes the idea of having a beauty salon close by and dreams of having blow-dries, manicures and massages, but she has no money. And Murad can't get a job in nearby Erbil because she doesn't know any males who could accompany her there.

This is a familiar predicament for many now female-dominated families whose options are severely limited by religious dictates and the fact that their menfolk are either dead, or in Syria fighting.

Back in the salon, Aubi's two-year-old daughter ducks in and out of the folds of her pregnant mother's leopard-print dress. She chatters happily among the women but when the photographer walks through the makeshift door carrying two large, heavy cameras, her demeanour changes.

Inside a bridal shop in the refugee camp. Photo: Andrew Quilty

She grows wary, and her game-playing stops. He takes a couple of shots, then aims the camera at her mother. The toddler gasps and starts to cry. He tries instead to photograph the profusion of sequined dresses, but she can't be placated and her angry screams become manic when her older sister tries to carry her from the room.

The two women are nonchalant: she is panicking because she thinks the cameras are guns. At such a young age, she has seen too much.

Within the camp, there may be peace, but there it is not quiet. More than 20,000 people live jammed along the makeshift roads between the portable toilets and industrial water taps. Music plays from nearby shops and popular Turkish television sitcoms can be heard from inside the tents. The sound of hammers hitting wood, as groups of men raise frames for the blue-and-white UNHCR tarpaulins, provides a ceaseless background rhythm.

Murad's friend, Hayat Sabri, lives across the street from the dress shop. She fled Damascus to the Iraqi border, then carried her two children and what was left from her life as a beauty entrepreneur on the back of a donkey for two days to reach the camp. But she is thankful for a $US500 loan from her brother, which she has used to build a makeshift salon outside her tent, to offer massages, make-up lessons and, she adds cryptically, "other things I can give the women".

Sabri is also trained in natural healing. She produces a black plastic bag carefully transported from Syria on the donkey from which spill packages of mint, zanjabil (which, on tasting, turns out to be ground ginger), nigella and cardamom seeds. She will use these spices to treat headaches, ease digestive upsets, whiten skin - and more.

Pausing suddenly, she says, "I miss Damascus. When I smell these things, I think of home."